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As y'all are probably aware I retired almost 2 years ago in the Philippines. My wife is from the Philippine's. As I was watching CNN International today a question popped up in my mind that I thought would make a good thread. So my question is: Who gets to decide who is mentally ill? On CNN the reporter or interviewer or whatever you call him was interviewing 2 different people. CNN was saying that the Texas gunman was mentally ill. And they also said that Paddock in Las Vegas was mentally ill. As far as I know neither of them had a psychological evaluation. Could it be that they were both psychotic. Or just pathological killers. I don't know if I got those 2 in the right order or not. Thank goodness the neighbor came with a rifle & confronted the shooter. But what surprised me was when President Trump said we needed to do something about mental illness. Do y'all know that until sometime in the 1960's that being Gay was considered a mental illness.
But what really bothers me is someday I'm going to come back to an America that has given the individual states so much control that the 2nd amendment will no longer have any weight. Even if it still exists & I will not be able to have the .270 rifle or the S&W 29 .44 mag my father left me or be able to get my own guns my brother has.
So who can answer my question?

This is the slippery slope. There is really no way to adjudicate everyone who is mentally ill as such before denying them their 2A rights. So, many of the gun grabbing leftists (and probably some on the "right") would love to be able to skip that step. And if they ever find a way to do that, they will quickly devolve the mental health issue into a gun control panacea. They are already trying the public health crisis angle. If they find a way to deny 2A enumerated rights by diagnosis, or by medication one is prescribed, and do so without adjudication, the list of diagnoses, "conditions" and medications will quickly expand.

Compounding all this is the fact that the professional medical, psychology and psychiatry associations are heavily left leaning and anti-2A. It would perfectly fit their anti-gun agenda to put as many "conditions" under the prohibited firearm ownership umbrella as they possibly can. Considering that psychology/psychiatry is still largely voodoo more than it is a concrete, medical science further mucks it all up.

Bottom line is that it would essentially give the largely anti-gun medical profession cart blanche to decide who is suitable to legally own a firearm. The noose would tighten very quickly. Add to that the fact that federal government is entrenched in the health care / insurance market and it's a friggin nightmare scenario. Hell, some leftists already consider gun ownership itself as indicative of a mental disorder.

__________________... "every statist occupies some particular location on a continuum of possible positions on the road to hell" ... Charles Ormsby.

IMHO and pure speculation, in some cases I think organic mental illness may have played a part (e.g. VA Tech shooter) and Newtown), but in others to include yesterday's in TX my gut tells me this person had an anger management problem that escalated to this shooting. Couple that with no moral compass and what one hears and sees in society and you have a wing nut on the loose. Seems to me, people have difficulty knowing how to relieve their internal pressure valve before things turn bad or simply dealing with societal, employment, family and person pressures. I would not put it past social media or the PC environment if it didn't play a role with this persons delusion (cheap shot bullying, revenge seeking, preying on the weak to gain power, ridicule, being shun, isolated, criticized etc...). Maybe this guy needed some form of counseling, but did not have the guts to seek help. It's anyone's guess at the moment.

Why he drove to Sutherland Springs to commit this act remains to be determined. Cowardly act. When confront and challenged, he dropped his weapon and fled. I would not be surprised if the good guy wounded him.

Any attempts to curb gun ownership based on the shaky ground of mental illness is going to be a very slippery slope. I think the profession is rife with PC and vagueness.

The psychologists that I have known and met seem to be more mentally ill than the people they are treating. Especially the ones in the mental wards and hospitals.

But typically it is a judge who makes the ruling on whether a person is mentally ill or not. The judge orders doctors to perform their tests on the subject and then reviews the findings. If the judge is a flake this could be quite questionable as to the rulings.

Why, the American Psychiatric Association. However, it's not that cut and dried, because the standards, as now published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). American Psychiatric Association, will shift over time. This has happened when political pressure and nefarious social engineers drive the APA leadership. Some day, you can expect to find among the disorders, reverent patriotism (apart from State-ism), Christianity, and resolute dedication to the 2nd amendment...

100 years ago it was very easy to get someone committed to a mental institution, whether they were actually mentally ill or not. A lot of wealthy old people had this happen to them when their greedy children turned on them and had them committed in order to take over their assets. Today we've swung to the other end of the pendulum... you can't be committed unless you volunteer to do so yourself or are charged with a violent crime and found not guilty by reason of insanity. The truth is, a lot of behavioral issues these days are caused by drugs, not just the illegal kind but the prescription ones handed out like candy by doctors. There's a pill out there for every perceived illness, and they're causing a lot of people to do some pretty crazy things. So just how do you stop a person who is otherwise mentally competent but is taking Prozac from buying guns? You can't.

__________________Avoid the temptation to replace everything on your brand-new 1911 just to make it "better". Know what you're changing out and why. You may spend a lot of money fixing things that weren't broken to begin with. Shoot at least 500 rounds through it first, then decide what you don't like and want to improve. Regarding vintage 1911s, pre-1970 pistols are highly collectible in original, unaltered condition and should NEVER be refinished or modified as it completely ruins their monetary value.

the crazy nut job, who for the past 25yrs has been a seemingly normal citizen w/o anything on his/her record decides today is the day. hmmm, this about describes Devin Patrick Kelley who shot up that TX church (less his military discharge). in reality, some sort of chemical imbalance in their brain that has been there for past 25yrs and suddenly went short circuit haywire.

you can profile all you want, you can look at psych records all you want, you cant stop this type of crazy UNLESS ---------->

Unless we properly protect people and places using ordinary law abiding citizens, because LE is not here to do that job (less cia,nsa,fbi, but they are looking for bigger terrorist things, etc). if that church had a local citizen there patrolling the outside with his/her fully loaded (call it whatever you want, media terms, "combat ready" or whatever BS they wish to label it) AR-15-300blk with a $2000 silencer on it with a $500 EOTECH on it and ten 30rnd magazines ready to go, 25 people would perhaps not be dead, instead it would have been 26 church goers alive and 1 bad guy dead, etc.

this sounds very odd to most, but how do you fight the enemy who is coming to kill you? the answer is, to be ready for the enemy! hence, to take away 2A rights is taking steps backwards, you reduce these types of incidents by arming everyone and being prepared for the enemy..

i dont visit this church often, but my bro-inlaw is a pastor at his own small church, and last year i bought him a ASIS "Security for Houses of Worship" book. i recommend this book for the leaders of all churches of all sizes, so if you know folks in church realms, this is a good book to suggest.https://www.asisonline.org/Membershi...f-Worship.aspx

If you have "a lot " of guns you are a gun nut. You should have them taken away.

"They" would label firearm obsession a form of mental illness. The judicial system, combined with existing laws, with some input from doctors are "they."

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.... and if you buy more than a 25pack of ammo, you are some sort of gun nut ......
maybe they have some system in place now that tracks sales of more than 25pack of one ammo in one sales order and red flags that to the fbi, kinda like if i transfer $10,001 to another bank/acct it gets flagged. tracking is their goal on many fronts, i am ok with that if the subject is some foreigner or from a suspect country, etc. me/we the std non-interesting law abiding citizens is off limits in my view. but then again, anti-2A want to take stuff away from you, control you, monitor you.

there's also little accountability on the fed side, they screw up and its as if nothing ever happened, on the flip side if they are "right" they send people to jail, and in some cases wrongfully so.

I dont think anyone should be kept from gun ownership, unless there is sufficient evidence that they are truly insane, and cant be cured. Otherwise the antis could label whoever they wanted, as insane, and unstable.

Back in the day the mentally ill...adjudicated fairly or not, were institutionalized. Since the 80s we have allowed them to run around free, depending on them to stay on drugs that sometimes are worse than the ill they are trying to stifle, and to obey laws they may not understand. Sometimes I wonder who's crazier...them or us.

100 years ago it was very easy to get someone committed to a mental institution, whether they were actually mentally ill or not. A lot of wealthy old people had this happen to them when their greedy children turned on them and had them committed in order to take over their assets. Today we've swung to the other end of the pendulum... you can't be committed unless you volunteer to do so yourself or are charged with a violent crime and found not guilty by reason of insanity. The truth is, a lot of behavioral issues these days are caused by drugs, not just the illegal kind but the prescription ones handed out like candy by doctors. There's a pill out there for every perceived illness, and they're causing a lot of people to do some pretty crazy things. So just how do you stop a person who is otherwise mentally competent but is taking Prozac from buying guns? You can't.

Spot on DSK. Anti depression meds have lots of side effects. You can go online and read all about it. I'd like to see a list of what these mass shooters are on.

The articles I have been reading claim that ALL of them were taking SSRI inhibitor drugs. All of them. All the way back in the 60s when Whitman did the Austin Tower shooting - he was on them too. I have seen friends take them and get really weird. People who used to be committed to an institution are now free to walk around on these drugs. From the same nice folks who brought you the opioid "epidemic". It's a brave new world.

The Pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money selling mental health drugs. They do this by selling psychosis.

Read "Madness of the Masses". Apparently an individual can be "delusional" for believing something in the face of evidence against it being true, but an entire community would not be considered delusional if they all believed the same thing that wasn't true.

I had a lot of interaction with the mental health community after 9/11. I was the captain of a house where everyone working was killed. We were in a battalion where everyone working was killed, and in a division where 3 of the 5 battalions were decimated. I wanted, I demanded mental health professionals give an initial counseling to my firefighters (around 50 guys) for screening of future problems. I was shocked by how little the mental health community can do that will actually help individuals and society. They cannot predict anything.
I see the chair of a postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for trauma and disaster studies of a very large university with a premier hospital on a fairly regular basis to talk in a effort to advance the science. There is a lot to learn.
Very often the competence and ethics of the mental health provider come into play. Look up Martha Mitchell and what Nixon did to her. The best mental health professional I encountered back then was a former cop who was retired on disability for wounds received stopping a bank robbery. He had common sense.

and with the additional info out, the dead nut job Devin Patrick Kelley was apparently not normal for a long time and FBI should have been tracking him.

Really? You willing to pay and field a few hundred thousand FBI agents to track every thing that ever got dishonorably discharged?

__________________"Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never do less." - Gen. Robert E. LeeRLTW!"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." - Thomas Paine

According to my sister-in-law, anyone who is enthusiastic about things that she doesn't like is crazy but she uses the word "silly". My father-in-law is "silly" because he plays tennis nearly every day. I'm silly and stupid because I like shooting. Her brother-in-law is silly because he likes sports cars.

We're all a little bit nuts at times. I'm sure that we've all gone off on rants about something. You just lost your job after 25 years of good reviews. Your kid totalled your new car because he was texting. You finish mowing the lawn and are looking forward to having that last beer in the fridge but the damned bottles slips out of your hand and smashes on ceramic tile floor.

We have a big stigma about getting mental help in this country. Sometimes you need someone to talk to, someone who isn't your best friend but is someone who will listen and offer suggestions for help. You lost your job, your daughter and your wife are both pregnant, your car dies, and the roof is leaking. My GOD, what do I do? Is there a path out of this? One out of a hundred thousand can't take it and snaps.

Many years ago, there was an incident in Silver Spring, Md. in which a guy in an office asked his supervisor if he could make a personal call (I've never been in a job where I couldn't make a phone call if I needed) but the boss told him, "You know the rules, no personal calls." The guy left, came back with a gun and shot five or six people. As far as I know, no one ever commented about why he wanted to make the call. Maybe he needed to call the hospital to check on his mother?

All we ever hear is "there were signs!" Really? How many kids are loners who listen to heavy metal and don't shoot up schools? How many retirees who are deep in debt don't take to rooftops to shoot at people?

This is the conundrum of living is "free" society. To be vigilante one must infringe up the rights of all or accept that some bad things will fall through the cracks.

Try to see it from the eyes of the "antis". It isn't always about the guns, but the people behind the guns who see conspiracy (actually there is some conspiracy) behind every event, or espouse such basic distrust of the government (some of it is warranted) that you have to wonder why they live in the US. They see that coupled with our guns and get nervous.

It may be time for dialogue rather than continuing to dig heals in and draw battle lines. To be understood, you first have to understand. Or, shoot 'em all and let God sort them out.

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